Carrizozo: An Illustrated History by Rick Geary

Carrizozo is the country seat of Lincoln, which comprises a full quarter of the state of New Mexico. But it's a small town, once a moderately important stop on a then-important train line and now a place best described as quaint and artsy, cheap enough for artistic types from across the country to move to and make their stuff there.

This book exists because of one of them: the cartoonist Rick Geary. Geary moved to Carrizozo a decade or so ago -- I think from San Diego, though he was originally born in Kansas City. And he clearly likes the place enough to research and draw a sixty-page book about it.

But, for the rest of us, this is the cartoon version of those small-published books that sit in the Local History section of the independent book store,  the ones typically with old-timey sepia photos of local landmarks on the cover and a lot of random local trivia (local famous families and how long some of them have been mayor! what that big stone building in the center of town was originally! careful tap dancing around a despicable history of racial animus! historical photos of groups of people, some of whom you may be distantly related to!).

Which is to say: this is a book that I assume will be sold in Carrizozo's local tourist office, and was sold to Geary's nutty fans [1], and otherwise will be beneath the notice of everyone else in the world. (And, let's be honest: every single book is beneath the notice of the vast majority of the world. Only a tiny few of them will ever hit 10% market penetration, the marketer in me wants to point out.)

So: Carrizozo! Jewel of the Tularosa Basin! Named for a local plant, with an extra "zo" thrown on the end for emphasis! Once site of a major roundhouse for the mighty El Paso and Southwestern Railway! Peaking in population at 2000 in 1920! [2] This is the book that will tell you all those things and more.

I can honestly say that this is the only book about Carrizozo you will ever need, unless by some bizarre quirk of fate you are the town historian of Carrizozo. If, by some bizarre chance, you are the town historian of Carrizozo, please update your website to include your name.

I don't have my usual Amazon link this time, but, if you are as nutty as I am, Carrizozo: An Illustrated History can be purchased directly from the author's website.


[1] Of whom I clearly am one. I debated backing the Kickstarter for quite a while: I usually back Geary's as soon as I see them, but I was close to the deadline on this one. Of course, how long you debated before doing a silly thing is obviously not evidence that you didn't do the silly thing.

[2] I live in what's considered a small town in New Jersey, and we have 10,000 people here. You likely live somewhere as large or larger; most people do.

Florida Man and His World: Two Books by Craig Pittman & Dave Barry

Sometimes you read two books because they cover the same thing, because you expect they'll bounce off each other in your mind. It doesn't always work out right -- books often aren't what you expect they will be, and you can never know how you'll react to them -- but it's always good to stretch yourself.

This was a very, very minor way of stretching myself: reading two books about how weird Florida is. Craig Pittman's 2016 book Oh, Florida! (an expansion and reconfiguring of a blog series of the same name in Slate a few years earlier) is the more-or-less serious version of the "hey! lookie how crazy this state is!" story, with more than a little history and a dozen-and-a-half thematic chapters. Dave Barry's Best. State. Ever. (also 2016) is vastly more frivolous, a book barely half the length with half as many chapters, all but the first of which were "go there and do the crazy thing" reports. (Since Barry had been retired as a columnist for about a decade, and the book doesn't credit previous publication, my guess is that all of the visits were for the book -- but it's possible that he did manage to sell them as articles as well, and the book just kept silent on that.)

I, of course, read them in the wrong order: Barry first, since it's shorter and funnier and sillier.

The reductive way of contrasting the two books is to point out that Pittman is a reporter: mostly on an environmental beat, for the Tampa Bay Times for the past decade or so, with three serious books of reportage on serious issues (manatees, orchids, grasslands) behind him. He's good at research, knows a lot of facts, and has a point of view that he doesn't let get in the way of a good story. He's also a native Floridian, that rare (but endlessly self-identifying) breed.

Barry, on the other hand, is a humorist: he wrote a column for several decades, and has made a very good living off writing one to ten thousand funny words about This Silly Thing on a regular basis for most of his adult life. He moved to Florida long enough ago that he spent most of his career there, though I still think of him as a Northeastern guy, since he was syndicated out of a Philadelphia paper when I discovered him.

Amusingly, Pittman covers most of the factual pieces in Barry's book, along with much more, in his longer and more in-depth book. (Pittman is silent on the Skunk Ape and did not, unlike Barry, attempt to get salable copy out of being a middle-aged man in a hot Miami Beach night club. Barry's chapters are also all about Being Dave Barry in a specific place and milieu; Pittman is much less present in his own book.)

The real difference in the two is tone. Barry is rich and successful, and got that way by being willing to be silly and happy in public, writing about any nutty thing that came his way. Florida, as Pittman says many times, is the land of the optimist and the dreamer, so Barry fit in well there. Barry gives no sign that the deep endemic corruption of his state matters in the slightest to him, or that any of the systemic issues -- the climate change that will probably doom Miami, the bone-deep racism curdled into things like "Stand Your Ground" laws, the toxic and hypocritical brand of evangelical Christianity so common there, the pure demographic weight of millions of old people who move there to waste their money and avoid paying taxes before they die -- are of any concern. So Barry's book is sunny and entirely happy: hey! let's chase a Skunk Ape! wow! let's go drinking in Key West! cool! it's the biggest retirement community in the world, and they're having lots of sex!

Pittman, on the other hand, clearly sees the rot. But he's a classic reporter, and so doesn't show any evidence that he thinks the rot could be entirely turned around or cured. Florida is a land for scams and schemers, he says: it might be possible to clean up parts of it here and there, but there's always a new crazy money-making idea (or an old one back again, like land speculation) and always several million idiots willing to put their money into it and probably lose it all. That's amusing, assuming he's talking to people too smart to be taken in by the schemes; the rot in other areas (destroying habitat for animals or humans permanently, the gun culture that kills millions, all of the particularly Florida kinds of corruption and graft and malfeasance) is less amusing, but equally entrenched. Pittman doesn't like any of that, but he doesn't have a muckraker's zeal to fight against it, either. And he's got a long, long catalog of nasty funny things that happened in Florida to run through before the end of his book, carefully organized into thematic groupings so the reader can see all of the depressing similarities.

(Pittman's epigraph is not "Forget it, Jake. It's Chinatown." But it could easily have been.)

So Pittman's book is subtly depressing for a careful reader. I image it's had a lot of uncareful readers, though: people who skim it for the crazy stories, let those reinforce their existing prejudices, and meander on with their little, misinformed lives. We can never do anything about those people. They will always be with us, and much of the time feel like a majority. Perhaps it's good news that, in Florida, they are at least entertaining in their idiocy?

If you want a silly, amusing book about Those Crazy Floridians, Barry has exactly what you need. If you want a deeper understanding of why they're Crazy, even if that doesn't lead to any blueprint to helping them (or you) get any saner, Pittman is the writer for you.

The Not-Quite States of America by Doug Mack

Whether or not the USA is an imperial power is a contentious question: it depends on your politics, your definition of "imperial," and probably who the President is at the moment. But the question of whether the US is an actual empire -- you know, with extra-territorial possessions that it conquered in wars and that are not incorporated into the country itself -- should be simpler, right?

And the answer is...Yes, actually.

Doug Mack explores that surprising answer in his recent book The Not-Quite States of America, a travelogue of all of the places that are attached to the USA but not actually part of it in the pure sense. He visited the US Virgin Islands, American Samoa, Guam, the Northern Mariana Islands, and Puerto Rico, all of which are full of people subject to the laws and taxes of the US and none of which actually have any representation in making those laws and taxes. [1]

Hey, I seem to remember that was a really big deal in some war the US fought. Guess it's less important when we're applying it to others.

My snark aside, the territories [2] are interesting places with quirky relationships to the USA, and all of them are conquered territory, either from the turn of the 20th century or from WWII -- which, clearly, is the cause of those quirky, complicated relationships. (Big powers tend to want to hold onto things they've acquired: that's how they became, and stay, big powers.) And they tend to raise those big questions, about what it means to be an American, and who qualifies. Most of the folks in all of these territories have skin darker than one end of the US political spectrum prefers, for example, and so, even if they consider themselves Americans (and they don't, always, entirely, consistently), would tend to be excluded by those contentious gents in the bright red caps for that reason.

Mack avoids those kind of questions, possibly for reasons of timing: Not-Quite States was published in 2017, and it's not entirely clear when the journeys he chronicles here actually took place. (Travel writing takes a lot of time and money -- I didn't see any indication that these pieces first appeared as individual articles, though they certainly could have, and that's usually my assumption with a travel book like this.) Instead, he's doing the core travel-writer thing: go to this place to talk to the people there, see the sights, wander around, and try to understand it as best he can in a short period of time.

Each of those places is distinct and individual, but their concerns rhyme -- they all have those deep questions about whether they want to stay in their current relationship with the USA, get closer, or break away entirely. The details are different: the don't have the same options, for one thing. And they're all poorer than the US average, more likely to join the military, and a few other similarities.

Mack is a pleasant tour guide through these territories: he does focus the book on himself and his quest to understand the territories, but he's standing in for the reader in that. (No one will read Not-Quite States unless they do care about learning about these quirky US possessions and want to think about how they relate to the larger polity.) He made what seem to be good contacts in all of these places, had some intriguing conversations, learned some interesting things, and wrote about them all in a graceful way. Not-Quite States does what a travel book should do, and does it well; I enjoyed reading it.


[1] And, in many cases, it's even more complicated than that: courts have ruled that some laws don't apply to the territories at all, and Congress can rule all of them pretty much by fiat if it really wanted to.

[2] Puerto Rico and the NMI are officially Commonwealths, which, again, is a more complicated way of defining essentially the same thing.